He was finally about to find himself. But he would do it in the strangest way, by declaring that there was no self to find.
Principles without sacrifice are easy.
“I never understood her,” he admits. “And I didn’t ever feel like she was being honest or expressing her feelings my whole life. As she was getting older, I begged her: Show your children who you are, because we want to know before you die. She couldn’t do it. So now she’s still just an unfinished person for me.” He rubs his eyes and his spirit seems to lighten, as if suddenly struck with a pleasant memory. “We only have this time, each of us, 70 or 80 years, if we’re lucky. What’s the point of hiding?”
Your kids… They don’t remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.
It is logic and beauty working against each other that makes things progress. My calligraphy teacher used to say that in the history of writing, the mind and the eye are the conservative forces, and the hand is the radical element that would rather be scratching out something with a stick.
This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it.
He saw the physical reality of labor as being, simultaneously, a necessity, an injustice, and the essence of humanity throughout history. The artist’s creative act was for him only one among many such acts. He believed that reality could best be approached through work, precisely because reality itself was a form of production.
When you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you invent the plane crash; & when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution. Every technology carries its own negativity, invented at the same time as technical progress.
What I find far more ominous is how seldom, today, we see the phrase “the 22nd century”
Life is tragic simply because the earth turns, and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death – ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.
Being creative is not so much the desire to do something as the listening to that which wants to be done: the dictation of the materials.
When we’re gone, they’ll put the year we were born, and the year we passed on our grave. In between, this life, will be marked by a dash.
Strange to think these daily rhythms constitute a life
We are imperfect lenses trying to resolve our influences onto a new screen, and the mistakes we make in copying we call originality.
One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real.
Be ruthless with systems, be kind with people.
A great building must begin with the unmeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed and in the end must be unmeasurable.
An autumn leaf, very crisp, fell somewhere in the dark. But it was only the page of a book, turning.
Children aren’t conscious of wanting to run. They’re only aware of wanting to get somewhere quickly.
Our job as creators is to further define any medium.
There is no proposition that does not imply the entire universe; to say “the jaguar” is to say all the jaguars that engendered it, the deer & turtles it devoured, the grass that fed the deer, the earth that was mother to the grass, the sky that gave light to the earth.
The only true paradise is always the paradise we have lost.
It is better to say ‘I’m suffering,’ than to say, ‘This landscape is ugly.’
One of the most satisfying aspects of writing code, for me: Telling a computer to do something, and having it follow your command so literally that it actually reveals to you that the problem you were trying to solve was much more complex than you had originally imagined.
How long does it take to make the woods? As long as it takes to make the world. It is always finished, it is always being made, the act of its making forever greater than the act of its destruction.